The Bay Area’s liberal but bipartisan offender looks back on the 2012 presidential election. Excerpt from “Elect to Laugh,” December 11, 2012.

WILL DURST, Political Satirist

In conversation with ANGIE COIRO, Host, “In Deep”; Program Curator, Mix TV

DURST: I have to recalibrate my entire act [after the election]. Oh, what a lovely 18 months that was! With all the characters, you know? Everybody led the polls; they just didn’t like Mitt Romney. Everybody had a shot. Palin led the polls. Trump. Bachmann. Christie. Perry. Caine. Gingrich. Santorum. They all led the polls at one time, [then] “Oh, all right – Mitt.”

COIRO: Let’s take you all the way back to Milwaukee, where you were born as a small boy. Is there a Midwestern sensibility? Did that have anything to do with shaping you?

DURST: I don’t know. Maybe the work ethic. Maybe the blue collar [culture] – my dad was a union guy. I always kind of related to the underdog, and Milwaukee was written off as a backwater town and Bushville. In 1957 when the Milwaukee Braves beat the New York Yankees, the New York press called Milwaukee Bushville. So I always took that to heart. I still have a soft spot in my heart and my head for Milwaukee. I just think it’s a great town. An undiscovered little jewel. Except I go back there two or three times a year, say hello to my friends, and we go to a bar, and I’m thinking, “Ah, this is so idyllic and rustic and bucolic, I could live here like” [snaps his finger]. Then I realize, no, I’d die in a bar fight in about a week.

COIRO: What about your West Coast sensibilities that you’ve developed? Would that doom you there?

DURST: That’s one of the things that attracted me to the Bay Area. Ostensibly growing up on the fringes of show business – in Milwaukee, there was no real show business. There were like flats and costumes and lights and that was about it. So coming out to the Bay Area, the whole live and let live thing was something that struck me deeply. You know, gay? Who cares? Who gives a rat’s ass? Black, white, gay, straight, it didn’t really [matter]. That’s what I love about the Bay Area. It’s the petri dish of social change.

COIRO: Are you a politically aware person who decided to get your message out via comedy, or are you a comedian who eventually decided politics was your schtick?

DURST: Both. My dad read three newspapers a day. He was a machinist. And my stepfather was a civil engineer, he read three newspapers a day. So you can imagine, shuttling between these two households, the newspaper was a constant and I just started reading. I went to journalism school and dabbled in journalism and theater and film. In high school I was writing. And everything was political back then. In 1970, when I graduated from high school, it was right in the middle of Vietnam. Some of you older folks, you remember those days. Everything was political. Your blue jeans were political; whether they were creased or faded properly. Your haircut was definitely political.

COIRO: The Examiner called you a combination of Mort Sahl and Will Rogers. You have that quote on your website. Will Rogers played vaudeville, he played radio, eventually movies to some extent. And then you have Mort Sahl, who became so political that he bottomed out. He was essentially blacklisted. I wonder how you look at that in terms of how far you can go with your politics, your opinions, and still be more Will Rogers-successful than Mort Sahl.

DURST: I don’t think it’s my job to proselytize one side or the other. If I’m going to advocate for something, it’s going to be for something of the humanistic spirit – can’t we all get along? My job is to make fun of these guys, because with laughter, sometimes hope can follow through on the inhale. If you can laugh at it, you diminish it. Like what Mel Brooks did with Nazis – Nazis! – and he made fun of Hitler, which is so cool! It must be so liberating to bring it down from this mythic level: Nah, he’s just a dick.

COIRO: You have a book, The All-American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing. There have been a number of editorials [saying] there’s not an equality between the sides, and a lot of journalism is starting to catch up and saying we can’t equivocate; we have to start calling some truth about whether one side is inherently less honest. How do you feel about the duality of American politics right now?

DURST: I call myself a bipartisan smartass.

Republicans see everything in terms of black and white. Conservatives, it’s all us vs. them, it’s black vs. white. It’s religion, it’s all god, god is good and everything else is bad. It’s easier to make fun of those kinds of views because they don’t allow for any gray area. Whereas the liberals, the Democrats, they’re all about gray area, and sometimes maybe too much about gray area. So that’s one of the problems I have with the liberals.

I like this definition of a liberal: The very term means accepting of many viewpoints. Which is why when you have the Occupy movement, and the Occupy movement was pivotal in the last election in raising the income inequality and the corporate greed [issues], but the problem is, you have to let everybody in.

You know, we’re Occupy Wall Street, and we’re talking about greed. And the global warming people show up. “All right, here you go.” And then the dolphin-free tuna people. “Oh, OK.” And then the reggae club needs a place to practice. And then the homeless wander by because the reggae club is handing out brownies. Pretty soon, you’ve got no focus.

COIRO: There are problems with the Democrats. For example, what happened in Michigan; they got the same notice from the election that everybody else got. It was a fairly decisive election decision that what Mitt Romney was talking about was not acceptable to a majority of Americans. However, they’ve gone ahead to move against unions. And here in California, where the equally decisive message was heard, the Democrats are saying, “You know, we don’t want to overstep. We don’t want to take too much advantage of the fact that we have a [super]majority and most of the power.” There’s something in there about the nature of the Democrat, the timidity.

DURST: That’s true, but it’s also an opening stance. They’re not going to go, “We’re going to change everything. It’ll be good – you watch!” Because you know it won’t be, and then they’re stuck with their promises.

It’s like the fiscal cliff. When [House Speaker John] Boehner says, “The president’s not giving us anything.” Well, that’s his opening stance, and it makes sense. He’s got his people who are looking at that and they need to see he’s standing up for them. He’s going to make a deal, probably. The same thing with Obama. That’s the opening stance and then [comes] the negotiation, and you don’t have to worry about it until December 31, and then they get a little closer and then they get closer. They might not even get together, but a deal will happen.

Remember TARP? The Republicans wouldn’t vote for TARP. And then the stock market shot down 600 points, then suddenly two days later, “Yeah, well, all right.”

It might take the stock market shooting down 600 points.

COIRO: If you had those two stances written down, and you didn’t associate either one with a party, let’s just say, Party A says, “We’re not budging.” Party B says, “Oh, we don’t want to be rude,” you’d know which party was which.

DURST: [Laughter.] “We don’t want to be rude!” I like that. That’s in my act: The reason the Democrats were so intent on passing the stem cell bill was that they’re depending on that research to generate a spine.

COIRO: Did you expect Mitt Romney to disappear so [fast], sinking without a bubble, disappearing the next day?

DURST: I did not. After that first debate, like every other liberal in America, I was “Aaayaargh!” and checking fivethirtyeight.com [Nate Silver’s political analysis blog], because Nate Silver was the only redeeming one there.

Romney was such a bad candidate, at every turn. He lost to a black guy during a lousy economy. Hello? They just didn’t have any good candidates. They have good people, there’s still people on the bench: Chris Christie didn’t run. Say what you will about Christie, [but] he’s popular. He’s not a populist, but he’s popular. And Mitch Daniels. Huckabee. None of these people ran. You had Rick Perry, who’s making plans to run again in 2016!

Romney wouldn’t reveal his tax records. You can’t tell me there’s not anything there that would’ve been embarrassing. I think a lot of people felt that way. He went to Great Britain and pissed off the entire country. Great Britain! That’s not one of the tough ones. The 47 percent comment. He went to one of his own rallies and he made fun of a supporter’s cookies because they were store-bought. Apparently the pastry chef was not on duty that day.

He was just a bad candidate.

[And] this year, Donald Trump pretending he was running for president. I know it’s all Republican bashing. But in four years, you’ll have two primaries; this year it was just one, nobody challenged Obama. So this year has been pretty heavy on Republicans, and I apologize. But just wait; next year, Democrats are back on target.

COIRO: I’m going to ask some questions from the audience. What do you think of Grover Norquist?

DURST: I actually met him one time. He always does this thing in D.C. called the Funniest Celebrity in Washington, D.C.; he always tries to tell jokes. One time I MC’d it, one time I was the guest. I shook his hand, and I actually called him Satan to his face. I said, “Satan, great to meet you!” He thinks I’m funny, so I think he should have a stake through the heart.

COIRO: You left that off when you met him.

DURST: No, I told him. I actually went on stage: “Evil incarnate.”

COIRO: What is the funniest thing happening in the Middle East these days?

DURST: I don’t know.

It’s dangerous over there. The Taliban, Malala, you just read these horrible, horrible stories. I try to concentrate on national stories, because the humor’s inherent. My problem is that I can’t work internationally. I used to do Britain and Scotland, I performed in Paris. Oh, my god, the crowd in Paris – it was expats who were so hungry for English-speaking entertainment, they would laugh at every syllable. You’d think you were Charlie Chaplin.

I’m going to go over to Germany. I have a friend who’s in Germany; he’s created a little English-speaking comedy circuit. I’m going through my act thinking about what’s going to translate. I think I’ve settled on being a baby boomer, because everybody can relate to that, and global warming, because everybody can relate to that.

If I go over there and talk about Rick Perry, it’s like I’m trying to teach a dog chess or something.

COIRO: Who are the funniest presidents?

DURST: I think Clinton actually gave the best speeches. He was the first guy to take them seriously, when they go to the Correspondents Dinner. He would rehearse his material and practice. [So Clinton was funniest] in terms of performance. Bush was funny inadvertently [laughter], but he also had a sense of humor about himself, which made it hard to hate him. You could dislike him and really abhor his policies, but he seemed like an affable guy. Maybe too affable, maybe sponge-worthy.

COIRO: “Sponge-worthy”?

DURST: Yeah, that you can mold. Like the time when he actually said, “I wasn’t sure we should go to war but they convinced me of it.” I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

But I always have these little cards that I carry around and take notes. At the end of the second Bush administration, the eight years that I call the full employment act for political comedy, I had both sides [of each card] just chock full of verbatim quotes from Bush, and just read them on stage.

No embellishment.

One was, “I think we can all agree the past is over.” But my favorite was, “The problem with the French is they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” The lovely moebius of that – the fact that he could say it but he doesn’t know it. Oh!

COIRO: Since you brought up the Correspondents Dinner, what is the comic’s view of what Stephen Colbert did?

DURST: Yeah, you and I got into an argument about this. I understand people [liking it], because at that point it was like six years in, it was after Katrina, and no one was speaking truth to power – and Colbert finally [does it]. I thought it was bad, because he didn’t make the crowd laugh; he was shooting past the crowd, so he didn’t fulfill his job description, which was to provide entertainment. He saw it as a greater duty, but he made all the journalists nervous.

But some great lines. One great line: “You’ve got to admire George Bush, because he’s resolute. He will think the same thing on Wednesday as he did on Monday, no matter what happens on Tuesday.” Which I thought was a great line. But he ruined it for political comedy [at the event]; the next year they had Rich Little, so they wouldn’t have a political comic back.

They do this all the time. it happened with Don Imus. Remember Imus said something incredibly unseemly in the presence of the president [Clinton] and first lady, and they didn’t have political comedy for two years; they had some guy doing cute puppy dog material.

COIRO: What’s your take on Clint Eastwood’s performance [at the Republican National Convention]?

DURST: That’s another bad Romney moment, because Romney picked him but Romney didn’t vet him. What are you going to do? “I’ll make it up as I go along.” All right! [Laughter.]

He upstaged the nominee’s acceptance speech by losing an argument to an empty chair! Outside of that, I thought it was a brilliant performance. Actually, it wasn’t that bad of a skit. But not for the Republican National Convention. Maybe the Every Which Way But Loose wrap party. And he had that hair; it looked like he’d woken from a nap and no one had [fixed it].

The Republican Convention is cursed. That’s the second in a row to lose a day because of a hurricane. They lost a day in St. Paul in ’08 with McCain and Palin because there was a hurricane coming up, and the same thing this time. You don’t think they’re still paying for Katrina?

COIRO: How is your act different before a corporate audience as opposed to a comedy club audience?

DURST: I’ll do more Obama jokes, Joe Biden jokes.

Joe Biden isn’t just a loose canon, he’s a loose aircraft carrier.

Obama’s a lawyer, Biden’s a lawyer, 13 of their 18 Cabinet appointments are lawyers. How effective can a government be if it shuts down every time an ambulance roars up Pennsylvania Avenue?

No matter what you think of Obama’s policies, you’ve got to admire his ability not to get involved in them.